Ulla’s Amazing Wee Blog

Thank God, Fluffy is back. He sneaked off on Thursday night, when he was having a run in the living room. Unfortunately the living room door was open(ed), maybe by Fluffy himself, and then he was gone. At first I did not worry as he is very curious, but when he is exhausted, he usually comes back for some food and water and just to check on what’s new around his home and if his hoard is still okay.

But this time he didn’t. So I went to bed thinking that he might chill out somewhere in the bedroom or that I would hear him rampaging and gnawing anyways when he is having his nocturnal adventures and then be able to pick him up again. Sometimes he even comes when I call him, and cucumber smells get him out and about even in the deepest sleep.

But this time I did not hear him at all, so he could only be really in the hall or the yellow room. Then I started to get worried, because the whole hall is full of rubbish which needs to be carried about a mile to the receycling bins and one of the core principles of having lost your hamster is: Don’t remove anything from your home.
Especially as he likes climbing into bags. But then it suddenly smelled strongly of paint, so when I opened the paint cupboard, I noticed that self-build nest of chewed up blastic bags and paper, but it was still unsure if Fluffy would have been in there this time. I took out everything in this cupboard, looked in eveywhere, even in all the shoes, the wellies, the bicycle repair bag, and the DIY toolbox. Nothing! I found some sunflower seeds – very suspicious trail, but not much else. I was getting really worried, because the paint cupboard is near the flat’s entrance and the worst possible cenario would have been that Fluffy had managed to escape out of the flat, especially as I did not hear any noises Friday night, but for the dysfunctional neighbours upstairs, whose favourite spare time activity seems to throw and drag furniture around in the early morning hours, accompanied by screaming kid and the parents shouting along with it.

So on Saturday I was pretty worried about Fluffy. My boyfriend taunted me a bit with my own “How to catch a lost hamster” advice- “You are supposed to be the expert” – and as his parents wanted to pass by and visit, too, so the main dilemma was tidying up everything and everywhere as quickly as possible without potentially removing a hiding hamster at the same time, without opening the balcony doors and always checking the entrance as well.

After we returned from dinner at the highly praised fish speciality restaurant “The Shore” with its beautifully presented food – I especially liked the strategically placed blueberries – but which tasted a little bit below expectations, me and Micah watched a little bit of telly at home and then suddenly I heared a weak scratching noise. I followed it and it lead me into the yellow room. Sounded like scratching on wood, so I dug out everything in this direction screaming “Fluffy, Fluffy where are you?” So, of course, the rebellious hamster stopped making any noise, and I had to wait till he started again. I could not believe that the sound came out of the bookshelf, but removed some files and folders and there he was! He looked really desperate and quite thin, and he had chewed a lot of my community activism papers to pieces. Luckily enough it wasn’t my certificate and qualifications or cuttings folder!

He seemed to be quite happy to be back and starting eating a lot of cucumber and stuffed himself with the sunflower seeds and some of his favourite little bits and pieces. I went quickly out and got him some fresh and tender dandelion leaves as well and told him off for worrying me so much to which he squeeked – he doesn’t squeek that often though, only when he is quite emotional. He has two types of squeeks; one which sounds hopefully a bit as “I agree” or in general just “positive”, and one when he is angry and swearing, like “What the fuck did you do that for?”, so quite “negative“.

Like when I picked him up after finding him in the community activism folder, I went over to Micah and showed him the hamster and Micah padded Fluffy, which quite upset Fluffy and he squeeked protestingly.
But as soon as he found his favourite cucumber and I talked to Fluffy after he had filled his stomach, he squeeked quite positively.

I am so happy he is back. So is he, I hope.
He had never been gone for so long.

The Edinburgh Festival and Fringe program is out now. Co-inciding with this, I had an interview with Three Weeks to do some reviews for them in August, and with the Big Issue Scotland to get a crew together to cover the Amnesty International Human Rights Festival. It’s all volunteering though. Which I don’t mind but for the lack of money. But at least the power balance of worker and boss is nicely egalitarian.

I particularily like the more non-commercial festivals, like described in previous year’s blog entry: “Edinburgh Festival for free”.
Word Power, the best bookshop in Edinburgh/Scotland/Britain, is launching this year its own little festival contribution. However, most of the small festivals are usually all run by volunteers and therefore they might not yet have their programmes together though.

When returning back home, a pleasant surprise was waiting for me: £40 in gardening vouchers for writing a “star letter” to the Amateur Gardening magazine. Wow! I went out at once and got some necessities for the allotment, a weed incinerator, which more or less looks like a metal rubbish bin with holes at the bottom and a chimney on top, and an insect house to encourage wildlife like bumble bees, ladybirds and other beneficial insects to stay close to my plot. Also a little bird feeder which is filled with water, so that insects and birds can have a drink, as lots of the flies were recently drowning in my nettle brew, which is supposed to be a DIY liquid fertiliser.

Today the long-awaited allotment film is starting out in the cinemas. It’s called “Grow Your Own” and is a fictional story based on a real-life project of therapeutic gardening with asylum seekers. But despite all the media attention, the project is threatened with closure as their funding is running out this autumn. They previously had some lottery funding, lets hope this isn’t going into financing the Olympics now!

Unfortunately I missed our AGM last sunday for our allotment site, and so far I haven’t met anybody who was there to tell me what has happened. The communication structure in our allotment site is not that good, it’s more word of mouth and a small official noticeboard, but I decided not too get involved too much into the organisational side, as am already involved in so many other groups and projects and prefered for a change to be one amongst many.

The fox has now built another home not only in my compost heap but also in my little heap of earth I have inherited from the previous plot holder. The fox just had cubs, so maybe I should try to encourage them to live somewhere else, not all of them on my plot.
The courgettes and the melons unfortunately died whilst I was away, the peppers became black ?! and the tomatoes look pretty unhappy as well. Don’t ask me why, but I guess it is just a bit too cold, grey and rainy here. They are supposed to be in a greenhouse, and now I know why.
A lot of weeds sprung up in the last two weeks, too.

I quite like the Observer’s allotment blog. Can sympathise a lot and it is nice to read of similar experiences and how they dealt with unknown pests and surprising plant results.

On Friday, we stayed in the camp and I did the interviews I promised for my dissertation project. Many people were already packing and leaving, and the atmosphere was relaxed, so I hoped to get some good insights and talks; it was hot as usual with the sun burning down, definitely more than 30 degrees and campers stood at the exit of the camp waving DIY signs to catch a lift to the BEACH!!!.

I first talked to a friend of mine from IMC UK, but the minidisc recorder seemed dodgy, so I just asked people hanging around the info tent and the IMC tent.

At first I felt a bit disappointed because of missing out on today’s actions, but as most of the more autonomous folks had already left on thursday after their 4.30 am walkout proofed unsuccessfull, and after the blockades it seemed that the final demo on Friday would just be pretty small and supposedly uneventfull as most activists were either heading towards the beach or home.

I suddenly realised that we have been missing out a lot by just focussing on reporting the actions and not just talk a bit more with other unknown activists, as there were some brilliant projects going on I did not yet know about.

The music people’s website is http://move-against-g8.de , some big subcultural bands played on the free gigs at the G8 protest camps: Irie Revoltes, Tom Morello (Rage against the Machine), Chumbawamba, Guts Pie Earshot, Quetschenpaua, Chaoze One, Jan Delay, Obrint Pas and Brigada Flores Magon, amongst many others like David Rovics and individuals from German bands less known internationally.

I also met an older pacifist who organises peace bicycle rides, like from Paris to Moskow this year, and next year with the transsiberian train and the bikes to the Olympic Games in Bejing. He was zooming round with a van more or less full of bicycles, apparently borrowing these out and collecting them, and furthermore donating old ones to prospective Eastern European peace cyclists without bikes.
More info under: http://bikeforpeace.de

The friend of the peace-cycling organiser organises the Tour de Natur, an ecological protest cycle ride, this year from Nuremberg to Offenbach, to protest against a gigantic potable water lake project, which will destroy apparantly a beautifull valley. Last year, they were apparantly cycling against the privatisation of the railways and public transport. More information at: http://tourdenatur.net

I also talked to a french squatter, one of the camp kitchen whose communal housing project is now threatened by a regeneration project, one of the camp organisers, some people staffing the info point, a Scottish activist, a participant of the Christian tent neighbourhood, a trade unionist as well as an ex-soldier plumber, who organises something similar such as conscious clubbing and did initiate the famous Peace Not War CDs some years ago to support the Iraq War protests.

Unfortunately the Handwerkherz, the collective of apprentice joiners who build the fantastic wooden showers, benches, watchtowers, bicycle racks, bar and childrens adventure playground, did not want to talk to me on record. They were tired, they explained, and also there would be at the moment quite a bit of internal controversy about their role in the camp and protest infrastructure and if they as semi-professional tradesmen would have taken on a specific political stance or something.

One of the most impressive campaigns publicised, were the present Japanese squatters and the current repression against them, with the eviction of Nagai Park tent city, depriving more than 4000 people of a home. Apparently this has happened in connection with some international Athletic championship in Osaka this year, which has seen some hardcore repression against homeless people and squatters, with some activists being in jail for over 7 months without trial.
More info via the Kamagasaki patrol: http://kamapat.seesaa.net

One of the newest campaigns are the Superheroes, which seem to be quite fun. It basically says that everybody is a superhero, because we would all need superpowers to survive in this globalised economy.

The blurb of the campaign says:
To survive neoliberalism, we have all become superheroes. The impossible is demanded of us everyday: We are Super-Flexible, Super-Sonic-Mobile and Super-Superfluous! But all over the world, people are discovering their secret superhero powers of creativity and solidarity in the quest to uncover commonality.

You (and our) superhero mission is as follows: Bring together the multitude of superhero subjectivities. Constitute common struggles, despite and beyond differences.

The Invisible Woman
The Invisible Woman is the worker you never see. She is the illegalised. The one without papers. No legal contract. No security. Sometimes working for a wage, and sometimes without. Sometimes, she produces goods for sale. More often, though, she produces the immaterial: ideas, images, affects, relations, life.
This is the key to her exploitation, as well as her super-powers.

Superheroes of the World Unite, You have nothing to loose but your chainstores.

Thursday night was short, so after the more autonomous protesters gave up their 4.30 am morning walk and I was back at about 6 am, I decided to go back snoozing a bit in the tent, as I had only 2 hrs sleep at most.

Another protest started of at camp Reddelich to join protesters at the westgate, but without the black-blocky people and I met all the other imc uk volunteers, who had slept in for the morning walk. They decided to join that march, so I thought that as I had a car, I could either catch them up later or go to a different event, so we had everything covered.

My boyfriend is here with me at the protests, but he is working now in one of the precarious temp jobs with low pay and long hours and without trade union support, and has taken precious holidays from his job, so he persuaded me to go to the beach with him and a friend from IMC Athens.

As we all got sticky and smelly from the hot temperature and sun and camping now, we were delighted to go to Niemhagen to the little East German town, where most of the clashes at the peaceful blockades happened on Wednesday.
When we arrived we were pretty alone on the beach, but got joined by about six police vans later onwards when we left.

We felt very refreshed and made way to Rostock via Warnemuende, where a big military harbour and infrastructure is situated and has been protested against on Thursday. We also missed the wrong turning and suddenly ended up in the traffic jam of the huge Bono-Geldof gig, which we had ignored so far. About 80 000 were there, according to the local radio station, who reported and transmitted live from the concert. The entry fee to the gig was about 2.80 Euros, and it was totally sold out in advance and according to mainstream media the biggest gig that ever happened here in the area. We were a bit dismissive about the gig, but met a local teenager at dinner who was at the gig and felt now motivated to do something against poverty and the G8 and enthusiastically asked us where she could please join the next sit-down blockade please – even though it was about 11 o’clock at night.

After our visit to the beach we made it to Rostock at about 6.30pm, in time to see what was going on at the convergence centre in Evershagen, where neonazis had announced an attack on it at about 7pm. Originally they wanted to have a march in Rostock against “left-wing chaotic people”, but it got forbidden by the court, so they mobilized on their website to attack the convergence centre, which would seem to be a pretty stupid idea given the amount of protesters in the city, but when we arrived there, the atmosphere was very tense, and there were surprisingly few people in the convergence centre to defend it in case of an attack. We might have been thirty or forty there, and my friend begged me to go. I told him that we couldn’t, that we would need to stay on and even would need to defend the IMC located in the convergence centre in case of an attack, especially as the bicycle information couriers returned with a number of 60 neonazi hooligans wanting to bash us up. The protesters luckily enough had built defences and nailed shut all the windows so the hools would have it more difficult to get in via the windows, and blockaded the doors with furniture. The tool workshop space was raided and shields were built out of pieces of woods and hose-pipes; more experienced activists used thick layers of tapes to adapt their bicycle pumps into something like a stick and glass bottles were collected.
A battle plan was consented on in the plenary, with people who did not want to fight directly being in the upper floors to be the second or third row of the defense. I was a bit scared in the way that the whole preparations sounded very realistic and I did not want to fight and so did actually nobody there.
I wondered if the police would really leave us to be beaten up, but the, Rostock is famous for the police not intervening during the racist attack in 1992 on the Vietnamese refugees in their low-rise, which has now been decorated with a gigantic sunflower mosaic, we saw it on the way into Rostock, when we got lost again.
In fact, many more people have died because of neonazi attacks in Germany in the last 17 years after the reunification. Numbers are in a wide range, depending if the police classifies it as an offence with a neonazi background, and quite often they don’t to not harm the tourist industry and the local reputation. But even officially, over 150 people have been killed alone, and many more injured. Sentences are low, because they like to attack in crowds, it is very difficult to prove in court who actually did the deadly kick in the face.

Given this background, the constant repression of left-wing activists by the German state is just ridiculous, especially the ones on 9th of May with the accusations of building up a left-wing terrorist network against the G8.

The atmosphere was pretty tense then in the convergence centre, but luckily enough, more and more antifascists came to support us and numbers seemed to even out, also the police appeared and the info was given out that they forced the neonazis onto a bus and shipped them away. I had left my press card and my passport in my car – how stupid of me – because the next thing that happened was that they surrounded the convergence centre and did not let anybody out without controlling their ID and searching them for weapons.
I heard a sound system and I still believe that there was a rally two houses away behind the trees by these neonazis, but could not go out and take pics or footage.

As soon as the neonazis disappeared, the police left and we were all free to go without ID checks and searches. We were told to take care still and not to go wandering around the city alone, so we picked up some hitchhikers as usual.

We also met the corporate press, which was late again and asking what was going on. Later on, our hitchhikers told us, that the neonazi rally numbers had gone up to 150.

When returning back to the camp, we met the other imc activists and heard that they were baton-charged, water-cannoned and specifically targeted by pepper spray, poor Jason even got specifically targeted by a policeman waiting for him with the pepper spray to turn his face into his direction, despite Jason having official G8 journalist accreditation and a video camera and is reporting for More4 and Channel4 occasionally as a freelance during this summit. Another DPA agency journalist was so heavily injured by the watercannon that he might loose his eyesight and is now in hospital. But Jason got his footage out on the evening news this Thursday evening on More4 News, of the policemen charging the non-violent sit-down blockade of the protesters, despite his video camera being drowned in the water by the water cannons and the pepper spray, but when I met him, he still was pissed off, that because of being pepper-sprayed he could not film the bloody baton-charge on the protesters. I am now really impressed, especially as without him the Channel4 lot would not have shown these important images and not even known about these, featuring pics and vox pox of protesters from the peaceful east gate blockade instead.

Wednesday was the day of blockading actions. These seem to work amazingly well, with even the little steam train “Molli” being blockaded as well as the three gates in the security fence. But it is not sure how much of a difference it actually made, as this year’s G8 summit has the whole Wednesday scheduled for arrival, with the first official event being dinner on Wednesday evening.

We first went with a car to the rally points to blockade the airport Rostock-Laage. Unfortunately not many activists were present at the two of the four points we visited, before organisers dissolved the legal rally points at 2pm.

Here are some pictures:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/06/372696.html

Then we continued to Rostock, as the police seemed to block many roads and we heard that the police would have surrounded the convergence centre. But the information we had was quite old, so when we arrived, everything was incredibly quiet, and we just went up to the Independent Media Access Centre and edited and posted pics and a short report.

We left pretty late at about 6pm, and first wanted to continue to Reddelich Camp, but heard from an info point that two blockades would still going on, after having started some time Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning. In fact, they are still going on right now, at 12 midday Thursday.
We arrived at about 7pm and had to leave some friends behind, who did not have any press passes, so we just went up there and took some pictures. Participants at the blockade complained that no water, food, or blankets nor anymore people were let through to support them in their protest.

Pics are here: http://scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4184/index.php

The internet connection and the Indymedia websites struggled yesterday, till about 2 am I was trying to get my pictures online. According to a rumour some autonomous protesters wanted to attack a fence and would like to leave at 4am, so i got up and went with them. They built some blockades, but were held up just after Reddelich by the police, after maybe walking a mile from the camp.
I was the only journalist there, which was a brilliant feeling, and i took some pics of the barricades, but unfortunately the memory card became faulty and I lost all the pictures. Anyways, they weren’t that brilliant anyways, just a historical document. As the autonomous, black-clothed protesters run away from the police into the fields, I decided I had enough and went back to the camp, encountering basically all the locals complaining about their rubbish bins being moved into the streets and used as barricades, and also there was a rockery with an alpine garden which missed the stones after the black block passed by.

More factual report here:
http://de.indymedia.org/2007/06/182484.shtml