Can you believe we actually built those sound swarm bikes, despite the raid and subsequent power shortages, despite the sleep deprivation, wet socks, freezing temperatures and paranoia? I bet even a tear gas canister fired into the Candy Factory wouldn’t have fazed us. There’s something so poetic about that post-raid evening of furious workshop activity: using power tools past midnight, stumbling around looking for unlikely bike pieces and welding and duck taping into the wee hours of the morning, fueled by chocolate, scotch, and a defiant race against time, cops, and the looming sense that whatever we were trying to give birth to was likely to be stillborn, if it wasn’t aborted outright. Nights like that one almost give me more hope in humanity’s potential to muster all its ingenuity, endurance and commitment to avert global warming than the next day’s actions.

The COP 15 talks were a failure, unsurprisingly, and we never managed to breach the fence or enter the Bella centre. But what are the chances that neither those broken bikes we had selected, fixed and mounted with megaphones the previous day, nor the affinity group members hastily assembled hours before the action, would break down or fail us? It shouldn’t be necessary to go to a weeklong carnival of protests in Copenhagen to keep the pressure on and practice direct democracy. Then again, a swarm of bicyclers usurping the highway bus lane, blasting music and ramming through two police lines without being arrested and detained could probably only have happened at that particular time and place. So Cheers to the grime, bone-cold, fumes, fatigue and police BOLLOCKS (and that sticker); they have crystallized in my memory and imagination as something beautiful and hopeful.

Very happy that Filistine/the Soundsystem of Nessesary Action and Resistence (SNAR?) made it through the blizzards of the north, mostly succeding in creating furious sounds and fighting off the stormtroupers, thus creating a very special appropriate vision of a solstice scene fit for a greeting card to round off the noughties.

To be brought back from COP 15 (15??? There must at least have been 1500 batonhappy cops in “Clubbinghagen”!) by all: Very, very cold bums, bruises, dogbites and one very hot planet!

Remember: THERE IS NO PLANET B!

VALE