Review of the Year 2022

January

The big news is a jury acquits the protesters who toppled Edward Coulston's statue into Bristol harbour. The right-wing snowflakes were up in arms about it, but more sensible heads spoke up for the right of juries to let off whoever they wanted. As someone who had been found Not Guilty by a jury I felt obliged to speak up, and The Guardian printed my words. 

Greenpeace, meanwhile, have us getting up very early to put up posters of their CEO Ken Murphy, as part of the campaign to stop them buying soya animal feed grown on what used to be the Amazon rainforest. 

Protest of all types looks to be going to be a lot harder in future. I go to a 'kill the bill' demo and the GMP PLOs make a point of telling me they know who I am. At least I know who to go to in the event of an identity crisis. 

February

I get to pretend I'm an academic as I give the opening talk in a day organised by Liverpool Hope University to discuss COP26. It was an interesting day, which also includes a talk on the legacy of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which is moving. 

Greenpeace, meanwhile, has us out and about in the rain making some nature art behind the Whitworth Art Gallery. I think we did all right. 

I also get to take part in what a world record attempt. The aim was to have the most people ever bivvying out, which is camping without a tent. I wander off in the dark and make a shelter from the wind on the edge of Kinder Scout. It's clear night and the temperature drops below zero. Fortunately I get my fire ging before I freeze. The stars are amazing, but I sleep like a log and wake up staring at blue skies. It was a good night. A record of sorts was set, but Guinness isn't happy with the paperwork so it isn't an 'official' record. 

The big news in February though was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This would be the focus of some actions over the rest of the year, see me doing some work with refugees and transform my Twitter feed into a military sitrep. 

March 

A project for Greenpeace Unearthed has me running round the moors chasing fires. It's not a bad way to spend my time, although it does lead to one incident of being surrounded by gamekeepers who aren't too happy about it. It's an important story as our peat moorlands are a huge carbon sink, far bigger than our forests, and they are being destroyed so rich people can shoot fat birds. In the end Greenpeace gets the info for their story from satellite photos. 

I also go to a youth strike in Manchester, but it's a bit of a sad affair as the previous organisers have all gone off to university and not been replaced. 

We also continue our campaign against Tesco, this time in the daylight.

April

I get to go to a party at a brewery. Cloudwater Brewery in Manchester have produced a beer to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass called Right To Roam, so they invite me along to give a little talk and give me free beer. I invite some of the Greenpeace group along and we have a good time. 

There are more celebrations in Hayfield so I go along. In a tent I find the Labour Party, the Ramblers Association and the National Trust, in other words all the groups who opposed the mass trespass in 1932. There is at least the Morning Star, representing the more radical flank of the left who actually organised the event. 

Patagonia ask me to lead their walk on the actual anniversary. They shut up their shop and bring a coach load of people out to hear me talk about the events of 1932. We walk the National Trust 'Mass Trespass Route' in excellent weather, collecting extra people as we go. It was a good day out and I hope my grandfather, an inveterate trespasser, would have been proud. 

May

Greenpeace had been tracking Russian oil tankers since the war in Ukraine began and in May one was spotted heading towards England and Greenpeace had a reception committee waiting. 

Two days later I was camped out in a layby near Grays wharf on the Thames in Essex waiting for a lorry carrying the Russian fuel to leave the terminal. I ended up being tasked to follow a Tesco tanker, and so I started an embarrassingly low speed pursuit across eastern England which eventually took me to Stalham on the edge of the Norfolk Broads. I get the photos and Tesco, who banned Russian Vodka, are caught bang to rights. The action was a huge success, reinforced six months later when the people who blocked the ship are acquitted, and no more Russian fossil fuels enter the the country, legally at least. 

In May it was The Big Plastic Count. This is a bit of a hit, both on the streets and in the media, and helped keep pressure on companies to reduce the amount of pointless plastic they produce, trying to balance out the pressure Big Oil is putting on them to use more. 

June

Something new in June was electric rallycross. World Rallycross had became the first FIA world series to go electric in 2021, and the rival American series Nitro Rallycross followed suit this year. They also came to Lydden Hill in Kent so we could see them first hand. 

Once you got used to them sounding like Scalextric cars it was great motorsport. With 1000bhp on tap it they certainly shifted. The series uses identical cars that aren't based on road going vehicles, so the event was also notable for no car company or fossil fuel sponsorship at all. Rallycross is one of the friendliest sports around and so we were able to chat to the drivers about the cars. They loved them. Swede Robin Larsson won. 

A quick change of clothes and I was off to work at the Glastonbury Festival for Greenpeace. I had a great team and it was a lot of fun, if rather hot. My duties included being a roadie for Easy Life and Self Esteem, and guarding the DJ booth for Mel C. I also had to test the drop slide and stir the shit - literally. Best of all though was hanging around in the Greenpeace crew area, which had its own bar, and fire pit, with people I'd not seen since before Covid. 

Then there was the music: Seize the Day, Suzanne Vega, Kate Rusby, Jarvis Cocker, Skunk Anansie, Robert Plant, Gong, Steve Hillage, the Arcadia rave field, Greenpeace's own Rave Tree (running until 5AM and 20 metres from my tent) and the amazing Paul McCartney playing one of the best sets I've ever seen. 

July

Unfortunately, after two years of dodging the virus, Covid finally got me at Glasto. Fortunately, thanks to three doses of Pfizer, I don't even get a single day off work. After a week I feel better and venture out to watch a game of T20 cricket. Phil Salt of Lancashire stumped Michael Pepper of Essex, and then in the next innings Pepper returns the favour by catching Salt. 

Meanwhile, climate change gave us a summer like no other. Even in Glossop the Mercury hit 37 degrees, hotter than when I was on my honeymoon in Barbados or the work trip to Majorca all those years ago (it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it). Mountain rescue had to retrieve a guy who had a heart attack going for a walk and one of my elderly clients died in his home. It was a couple of days like I'd never experienced before, but will no doubt experience again. 

It had cooled down a little by the time my boys and I went for our annual camping expedition to Eryri National Park. We climb the Glydders. Glydder Fawr is now two metres taller than last time I went up it, making it a 1000 metre peak at last.

August

The UK government started approving new North Sea oil and gas fields. Protests stopped the Cambo field last year, but there were more, including the Jackdaw gas field. The government approved the field, but Greenpeace put in a legal challenge. 

I decided to do my bit it and organised a little protest in Manchester as part of a national day of action. Three members of the Greater Manchester Police service turned up to watch us, but all went well. Stephen Pennels gets the prize for best dressed activist. 

The heatwave is drying up our reservoirs and so Greenpeace send a CBeebies presenter up to be filmed walking around the Woodhead reservoir. I advised on where to park and where to go, but I also think the Derwent makes a better place to show what a climate crisis looks like, so I pop out and film myself.

September 

In September the Queen dies, having clung onto life long enough to sack Boris Johnson, which must have given her some pleasure. Her funeral gives us two weeks respite before Liz Truss's mini budget blows up the economy. 

I remember the one time I met the Queen, which was a Greenpeace protest outside Canada House in 1998. A giant banner saying God Save Canada's Rainforest had been hung from Nelson's Column, and my job was to remove the crowd barriers to allow some fake Mounties through. 

Back in 2022 we go to the Wilmslow Car Free Street Festival. The good citizens of the down give their chauffeurs the day off and leave the Rollers in the garage and have a party in the high street. It's not exactly Reclaim the Streets, but its fun. 

Our new Prime Minister lifts the moratorium on fracking and so campaigning against shale gas starts again. I get interviewed on Radio Manchester about why this would not a good idea. This was one radio interview I did not need to prepare for. 

Also this month I start doing some overtime helping Derbyshire County Council check on the welfare of the Ukrainian refugees people in the county are hosting. They're an interesting bunch of people, both the hosts and the guests. 

October

It's Andy Burnham's fifth Green Summit and I go along. Compared to the first two there is a lot to celebrate now. Manchester is now on its way to getting a publicly owned, all-electric bus fleet, whilst Liverpool and Manchester are teaming up make the Northwest a renewable energy centre with a hydrogen plant and tidal barrage. Considering how little actual power Burnham has it's a great achievement. I also get a free lunch, free beer and the invaluable chance to talk to business leaders and local NGOs. The main thing the former want is a government policy. Almost any policy. 

The opposite of a green economy, Liz Truss's ecocidal government, came to a sudden end only a week later, felled by a Labour motion on fracking. When the dust settles we realise that not only have we finally won a campaign that looked pretty hopeless nine years ago, but we took out a Tory Prime Minister in the process. That's a good result by any measure. 

Also this month I meet Warm Homes Whitfield for the first time, a group of people who've come together to campaign for renewable energy and home insulation as they can't afford to heat their houses.

November

Greenpeace launches a new film. Called The Cost of Living it was made in the Rother Valley and shows how people are having to come together to survive the energy crisis. 

The Manchester Greenpeace Secret Squirrels help with the publicity. Rather remarkably, the premier is in Glossop, hosted by Warm Homes Whitfield. I'm master of ceremonies and once I've collected Heather from the station and sorted out the audio-visuals, I host a debate about what it means for the people of Whitfield and what the government needs to do. There are some moving words and a few tears. Our MP doesn't turn up, which isn't a huge surprise, but it's a good start for a new group. 

We then show the film in Manchester, and this time our invited guest turns up. Afzal Khan, MP for Manchester Gorton is complementary about our film and says he wants to show it in parliament, which is a result.

December 

And so our campaigning year somes to an end. Manchester Greenpeace's final act is to take Sami, it's climate change fighting polar bear, for a pub crawl around the Christmas markets. She ends up in Night and Day bar listening to a set by the rapper Devlin. The bar has some legal issues, so it's great to be able to support it. Sami has a good time too.

So that was 2022. A war, a heatwave and some progress but not as much as we need. Roll on 2023. 

Cockersand Moss Temple

Location: Cockerham, Lancashire

Cockersand Abbey is the remains of a twelth century Christian priory, located between Blackpool and Lancaster on the Lancashire coast. All that remains today, apart from a few fragmens of wall, is the octagonal chapter house, and only because the it was used as a mauseleum by the local landed gentry. It stands on the edge of concrete sea defences, with a view of Heysham nuclear power station. Nearby a coastguard station stands empty and derelict. Perhaps not the most liminal place you can imagine, but there is more here than meets the eye.

In 1718 two Roman statuettes were found nearby. They have since been 'lost' - which we can read as stolen - but the inscritions of them have been recorded. These state that the figures were dedicated to Mars Donotus and Mars Nodontis. Now we are all familiar with the pantheon of Roman gods Mars, Jupiter etc. But when you get a god with a double barrelled name, like these, it usually means that the Romans have grafted on to a local deity the name of the god they think he or she most resembles. An example is Sulis Minerva, the goddess of the baths in Bath.

Donotus and Nodontis are probably the same chap. A local spelling, or a mispelling, of the Celtic god Nodens, who has a well preserved temple in Lydney Park, Gloucester-shire. Nodens, who also appears as one of the good guys in H P Lovecraft's mythos, appears to be the British version of the Irish god Nuada, who appears in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, otherwise known as the Book of Invasions, as the man with the silver hand to helps the good people of the Tuatha De Danaan defeat the Fir Bolg, but dies in the final battle.

So thanks to the Romans we know name of one of the local Celtic gods of this area. The odds are that there was a tmeple round here then. We don't know where abouts exactly, but in the past the marsh would have been a lot marshier, and as neither Pagans nor Christians like getting their feet wet when they worship, both the abbey and temple were probably built in about the same place. 

When visiting Cockersand Moss then you need a bit of an imagination.

Ignore the sea wall, the nuclear power station, the nearby farm with its huge slurry tank, and even the crumbling stones of the abbey, and think your way back to Britain before the Romans arrived, when all that would have been her was the wind, the sea, the marsh, and whatever simple temple was built here.

If you do so, then you can perhaps get close to how it may have been, two thousand years ago, when our ancestors visited this desolate, and probably dangerous, marsh to worship the warrior god with the silver arm.

References

http://roman-britain.co.uk/places/cockersand_moss.htm

The Roman Inscriptions of Britain by R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright (Oxford 1965)

Nuada The High King by Jim Fitzpatrick

Dave Foreman Obituary

Dave Foreman, who died last week aged 75, was an American radical environmentalist who helped to found the radical environmental group Earth First! He was throughout his life a controversial figure, but also a fearless champion of non-human life on Planet Earth.

Foreman was born into a military family in New Mexico. He started his career as an activist by campaigning for the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and he spent the 1960s being active in Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing group opposed to hippies and the peace movement, although he also worked as a teacher in Zuni Indian reservation. He briefly joined the US Marines - whilst the Vietnam War was raging - but was dismissed after going AWOL. 

By 1973 though he was working for Wilderness Society, a venerable Washington based group that mainly campaigned for the preservation of Federal lands. Despite the seventies being 'the decade of the environment' Foreman became disillusioned with the professionalisation of the environment movement and it's increasing reliance of alliances with government and big business. It was on a weekend expedition away from DC that idea for Earth First! was formed. The story has been somewhat mythologised, but what everyone agrees on is that Foreman was hiking in the Pinacate Desert with four friends and lamenting the state of the Big Green groups when Foreman suddenly called out 'Earth First'. The group had a name and, thanks to Foreman's friend Mike Roselle, a logo of a clenched fist. To this would be added the motto 'no compromise in the defence of Mother Earth'

A huge influence on Earth First! was the writer Edward Abbey and his book The Monkey Wrench Gang. The story was a neo-Western in which the four heroes wander the American South-West blowing up logging, mining, and construction equipment. Earth First! was never to be that radical, but the emphasis on action over lobbying, decentralised organisation over national structure, and campaigning in the wilderness rather than the Capitol, was to be the hall mark of the new group. 

The groups first action was to roll a fake crack down the Glen Canyon dam. Glen Canyon was the legacy of a Faustian pact by the Sierra Club and the government, where they agreed to not oppose the flooding of the canyon in return for dams in the Grand Canyon being cancelled. Unfortunately, they agreed the bargain before they'd seen Glan Canyon, and only then realised their mistake. Destroying the dam had been an ambition of Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang too.

Earth First! soon moved on from publicity stunts and radical conservation proposals, to taking direct action, mainly to preserve ancient forests. When road blockades didn't work they went into tree sitting, and then to the more controversial tactic of tree spiking. 

The annual gathering of the organisation was called the Round River Rendezvous, named after an Obijwa myth. Given Foreman's background there was not surprisingly a right-libertarian vibe to EF! in those early years, which earnt it the nickname 'Rednecks for Wilderness'. Foreman helped fuel this idea with controversial statements such opposing giving food aid for the Ethiopian famine and opposing immigration into the USA. But as the eighties rolled on more left-wing anarchists started to join EF! leading to tensions with the old guard. At the 1987 Rendezvous Edward Abbey was heckled, which did not go down well with Foreman. 

These tensions resulted in a debate between Dave Foreman and the political philosopher Murray Bookchin. Bookchin's theory of social ecology was in many ways the opposite of the Deep Green philosophy Foreman had adopted. however, their correspondence remarkably produced more light than heat, as resulted in the book Defending the Earth. Foreman apologised for, and clarified his more controversial views, whilst Bookchin spoke of his admiration for Foreman as a champion of the Earth. Differences remained. Bookchin was suspicious of the anti-humanism in Deep Ecology, whilst Foreman was concerned that many anarchists were 'anthropocentrists'. Nor did he believe conservation could wait until 'after the revolution'.

By the time the book came out though Foreman was about finished with Earth First! but in 1990 he was still closely enough associated with them for the FBI's COINTELPRO to try to set him up. FBI special agent Mike Hain joined the group and befriended Foreman and others. Hain planned a mission to bring down power lines to a nuclear power station. The FBI agent bought the cutting equipment himself and drove the team out into the desert, where the SWAT team was waiting to arrest them. Foreman was not on the raid himself, but was arrested on conspiracy charges. He acquitted of the more serious offences but given a suspended sentence for the misdemeanour of giving a copy of his book Ecodefence: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching to an FBI informant. The Bureau in the end spent $2 million discrediting Foreman and Earth First!

In 1991 Foreman co-founded the group that became known as the Wildlife Network, a more mainstream conservation organisation aiming to preserve the diversity of wild places. In 1995 he completed his journey from the mainstream to the radical fringe and back when joined the board of the Sierra Club, one of the Washington based Big Green organisations Earth First! had been created to oppose, although he was to leave again before the decade was over though as once again his views on immigration caused controversy.

In 1992 Foreman had coined the term 'rewilding' and this is what he dedicated his energies to in the last two decades of his life. He set up the Rewilding Institute with the aim of doing more than just preserve what was left of America's wild places, but instead to bring back apex predictors and create a more diverse wilderness. Like Earth First!, rewilding was an idea that was to go far beyond what Foreman initially envisaged.

That indeed is the dilemma of Dave Foreman's life. Despite being a distinctly right-wing libertarian with some extremely conservative views, he ended up being the catalyst for groups around the world that have mainly been embraced by people with diametrically opposed political views. Personally, I am one of them, but if we are to indeed save, and rewild, the Earth we need people from across the political spectrum to care for the environment. If everyone on the political right was a Dave Foreman, we'd be in much better situation than we are.

Lindow Moss

 Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire

If you want to know what a liminal place was for the ancient Celtic people of this land, look no further than Lindow Moss, in Cheshire.

Located next to the well-healed commuter town of Wilmslow, where the 1% of Greater Manchester live, not a lot of the original moss is left.

However if you visit Lindow Common, on the outskirts of the town, preferably in the early morning, when the dog walkers are thinner on the ground, and ideally when a mist still hangs over the waters of the mere, you get some idea of what it was like here two thousand years ago. Seeing your reflection in the black water, the Otherworld of Celtic myth, a place of light and shadow, joy and terror, that lurks just beneath or below our world, can seem very real.

Most of the rest of the moss has now been drained, allowing the peat that has built up over the centuries to be dig up and used as an extremely unsustainable form of compost. In 1984 it was peat cutters who found the person who makes this area famous: Lindow Man, or, as the locals called him, Pete Marsh.

What they actually found first was the head of a woman. The police used the discovery to prompt a Mr Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in 1960, but it turned out the body was much more interesting, being nearly 2000 years old.

The next year the even better preserved body of Lindow Man was found. A healthy young man, who had done no hard labour prior to his death, he was naked and died either by strangulation by a  leather cord, a blow to the head, drowning, or possibly all three. He also had traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids. His 'triple death' mirrors that recorded in Celtic myth, and coupled with the liminal place in which he was found, suggests human sacrifice. We can't be sure, and don't know if he was genuinely posh, or just given a year or so of living like king in exchange for being given a ritual death.

Radio carbon dating places his death in approximately the first century AD, right about the time that the Romans were conquering this part of the known world. Could Lindow Man have been an offering to the Gods, asking them to turn back the seemingly unstoppable legions with their suspiciously straight roads?

When I first came to this area it was also to stop something. As anyone who visits the place will immediately notice, we are right next to Manchester airport here. In 1997 protesters were occupying land nearby to stop the construction of a second runway, living in primitive camps. I, like the notorious human mole Swampy, was busy digging myself into the clay soil, with the aim of making it more difficult for us to be evicted, and hoping I would not be sacrificing myself in the process.

In the end we were all removed by the forces of law and order, and just before the construction crews moved in, archaeologists were allowed to explore the area. Underneath our camp they found the remains of a bronze age village.

Did the people of this village know Pete Marsh, I wonder? And if so, what did they do when they
realised their magic had not worked? Did they continue to visit this liminal place, and to worship the old gods, or did their faith come to an end?

I didn't stop Manchester Airport's second trunway either, but I still visit the moss. On one day in April 2010 my faith was rewarded though. An Icelandic volcano had grounded flights, and I walked across the moss to an airport that was as silent as the woods I passed through. For a little while I could pretend we'd won. 

So this is a very special liminal place for me, one that links this world to the Otherworld, the present to the Celtic past and my life as it is now to the more carefree days of my youth.

Incidentally, ignore the grid reference for the location of the find given on Wikipedia, in the guide book and the various press releases. The actual spot is just off Moor Lane. Peat cutting has now finished here, so nobody knows if there are more bodies waiting to be discovered, including the unfortunately Mrs Reyn-Bardt.

Liminal Places of England

 If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite' 

William Blake

A liminal place is a threshold between the mundane and the numinous. It is somewhere where you can be 'between the world's'. The Romans used the word 'numinous' for the divine or the supernatural, and Tolkien would later use and adapt it for his Atlantis-like island, Numenor.

In 1972, the year after the first Glastonbury Festival, Janet and Colin Bords produced a book called Mysterious Britain. It was a guide to Britain listing a smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects: ley lines, UFOs - which were so popular at that time that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land - as well as stone circles, holy wells, ghosts, 'pagan' folk customs and King Arthur.

The book was part of the 're-enchantment of Britain', a second era of romanticism, when hippies and flower children, fed on the vibes emanating out from San Francisco, sought Avalon in England's green and pleasant land. In doing so they linked up with the Celtic revival movement and the rebirth of paganism in the British Isles.

The publication of similar books persists to this day, and it seems I own most of them. As a result I have now been to enough of these otherworldly spaces to write my own blog. So here are the places that have moved me most. Whether it is their history or their beauty, their use by pagans old or new, their importance to Celtic culture or the counter-cultures; what they have in common is that they are places for retreat or spiritual contemplation.

Visit them yourself, please, but follow these rules: be reverent to the genius loci of the place, travel wisely, litter not, and leave only your footprints behind you.

Review of the year 2021

January

2021 began with us all in lockdown, which put a bit of a limit on how much campaigning we could do. Still, it meant I could enjoy the snow that we had.

Down in London though a certain Mr Daniel Hooper and co. are deep underground at Victoria station, trying to stop the HS2 high speed railway line. Dan, when he was under the alias Swampy, 'stole' my socks in 1997 after I apparently lost a drinking game, so I wasn't going to let him have all the media attention.

I sent The Guardian an email saying that they could be getting to the tunnels-starting-to-fall-apart stage, and The Guardian rang straight back as apparently they were at the tunnels-starting-to fall-apart stage.

In the end everyone is safe, although HS2 wasn't looking so good, and I got my fifteen seconds of fame.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/29/hs2-protesters-conditions-euston-tunnel-deteriorating

February

Lockdown made campaigning difficult still, but the Manchester Greenpeace Group still managed a celebration of walking and cycling. We didn't manage to get out together, but we cycled on our own and I spiced the pictures and videos together to make a short film. Bea had the best job, of pedalling round the Manchester CYCLOPS, a new style of junction where the traffic lights synch to the cyclists. 

March

In March the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission failed to take any action on catastrophic overfishing, more proof that are oceans are not safe from industrial fishing. We took minister Zac Goldsmith to task online over this.

Meanwhile lockdown gave me plenty of time to explore my local corner of the Peak District National Park, in particular the bits in between the bits I usually walk around. I found a few new waterfalls, and some quite places I will try to visit more often.

April

And finally we are allowed out again to play. Sort of. Ocean floor mining is a new threat to our oceans, not that they needed another one, and on that Greenpeace intends to campaign on.

We weren't allowed to meet the general public yet, but we did make a nice banner and got to hang it off various places around Manchester.

Steve Speed took some decent photos, and one ended up in the Morning Star. 

May

The lingering pandemic may have still prevented us meeting real people, but we were still able to carry 'secret squirrel' missions in the dead of night. 

Deforestation is the major driver of climate change after buring fossil fuels, and most of that is animal agriculture. We don't import much meat raised on former rainforest into the UK, but we import a lot of animal feed grown in Brazil, and the main company doing this is Tesco.

In order to let people know about this the Manchester Greenpeace 'secret squirrels' carried out a number of dawn raids on Tesco stores, leaving chalked messages outside. 

The Greenpeace group also decides to go wild camping this month. Unfortunately, we pick the wettest day of the year so far and nearly drown just getting to the site. However, I set up the tarp and light the fire and we all have a good time, even the dog.  

June

We're still targeting Tesco, and Greenpeace pay a proper photographer to come out with us. We take the poor chap for a rather long walk around Manchester and Salford, but we get some really good pictures back.

Also, in June a little reunion was arranged for the anti-fracking tribe. Old friendships were remade, much was drunk, and we remember those we stood with who are no longer with us. In the UK, at least, shale gas will now stay in the ground. 

July

And it's Tesco again, but this time in the daylight. The aim is to deliver a letter to every store in the country, and to be photographed outside. Seeing as there are over 100 branches in Manchester alone, that's a challenge. The shop managers though, when we meet them, are mostly supportive of the campaign, which shows how difficult it is to pick heroes and villains in this game.

August

Tesco campaigning continued. However, as it was summer, I thought I did deserve a sort of a holiday, so Number two son and I went off for a few nights camping in Cambridgeshire, and I now have a new favourite camp site.

Fen End Farm near Cottenham is an off-grid, organic orchard where you can pitch your tent amongst the trees and be alone with the stars. It has composting toilets, home-made apple juice and firsts rate facilities and is run by friendly people. I brought my own tent, but their yurts and tipis looked very tempting for next time. 

September

Normality returns by degrees, and we get to go to a festival. Wigan Diggers is always fun, and this year our stall celebrated 50 years of Greenpeace. 

This year was especially exciting for our Sami as she got to meet two of her heroes; Jeremy Corbyn and Maxine Peake. Jezza got to blow out the candles on our small, but perfectly formed, vegan birthday cake.

Elsewhere, celebrations of Greenpeace's half century were relatively restrained. This was not really a time for resting on laurels. There were some interesting online events though, and I got to 'meet' some of the significant people in the history of the organisation, including Susi Newborn, one of the founders of Greenpeace UK.  

My own contribution to this, as someone who has been involved for about half of those fifty years, was to appear on the Manchester New Green Deal podcast.

The Greenpeace group were also out and about in Chorlton, getting ready for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Greenpeace UK was making a tapestry with contributions from groups around the country, and we set some small people the job of making our offering. Using the theme "No Planet Bee" they made little hexagrams of what they would like the future to look like.

October

The Tory Party was in Manchester and so there was a demonstration. It was a decent turnout, probably the biggest post-Covid gathering outside of a Black Lives Matter demo. 

We formed a climate block at the back of the main event, and as a result were the last to arrive at the Castlefield Bowl. 

As far as the press were concerned, we needn't really have bothered, but it was great to be back out with real people again.

Also in October, Greenpeace sent us a
cardboard cut-out of Tesco CEO Ken Murphy. It was actually a rather flattering one, as he he's a lot trimmer in our version than real life. Anyway, we took our cardboard Ken on tour round some of the branches in central Manchester.

Tesco are apparently feeling the pressure, but they weren't throwing in the towel. This looks like a being a campaign that's going to be a long haul. 

November

So, after six years of waiting it's finally COP26, the most important international conference on climate change since Paris in 2015.

There were various lead up events, including a big Youth Strike, which I was at, and an early morning 'secret squirrel' mission to display messages from people on the front line of the climate crisis on a disused building before the big march in Manchester.

As for the march itself, it was a bit stressful, but it got there in the morning. I was one of the compares on the stage, and Covid meant a quarter of our invited speakers failed to turn up, one sending her apology by text whilst I was opening the rally. In the end though it was a success. Our speakers were almost all women and people-of-colour and mostly trade union or refugee activists.

We also had a decent turnout. This video gives an idea of how many people there were. 

The march over, I went up to Glasgow myself. In Paris six years ago there was a state of emergency due to terrorist attacks, this time it was Covid. This meant wrist bands and queuing to get into venues. This made it all rather less spontaneous and anarchic, but it was a still a chance to meet activists from around the world. The theme of the week was climate justice and in particular Loss and Damage, which, thanks to the demonstrations at the weekend, was discussed at COP for the first time. 

This is a little video I put together afterwards. 

Also in November, the Glossop Guild invited me back to do an evening lecture on the history of Greenpeace. It's an easy audience and it goes down well. 

December

And with that I was done with activism for the year.

It was difficult to point to any major successes for the green movement during 2021. COP certainly wasn't one.

However, come the end of the year things were looking better. The number one film on Netflix as the year ended was Don't Look Up. A film with a strong message about climate change denial, it was actually pretty good. More importantly it started a conversation about the climate crisis amongst people who don't usually talk to crusty eco-warriors.