Sophie Heawood: marching for climate change

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/27/sophie-heawood-march-for-climate-change

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Sometimes you just want a quiet life, which is why I wasn't going to go on the climate change march last weekend. Well, I did initially plan on going – you hear about these protests and you're immediately filled with a burning desire to stand up and be counted, because the sea levels will soon be up past our chins and the sun is going to be replaced by Jeremy Clarkson's face on a burning orb, and what are the simpering simians in government actually going to do about it?

But then the Sunday morning of the rally arrived, and I was tired, and I started to wonder if my burning sense of moral urgency might just have been cystitis. I thought about the last time I tried to protest about something environmental, when a student friend took me to the sacred woodlands to join the tree-people who were blocking construction of the Newbury bypass in 1996. And how we had gone there in her car, and driven around and around for hours, trying to follow the map on a handprinted leaflet that we'd been given by a protester and growing increasingly bewildered by the fact that the road we were on never matched the shape of the one on the page. Until it dawned on us that it wasn't actually a map – we were trying to follow the proposed route of the Newbury bypass.

I thought about the fact that I have a kid now, and that the wheels of her pushchair would probably bash into the dangling bongos of marchers who believe that toothpaste is a conspiracy and that 9/11 was a false flag operation. I thought about the celebrities who said they were going on this demo, including Russell Brand, who lives near me, so I can stand behind him in the queue at Tesco and watch my friend take a photo of the back of his head any time I like.

So I could have happily turned on the telly instead. But the television wasn't working, because of a massive electrical storm that hit the satellite dish two days earlier, which got me thinking.

So off we went. Into central London to join a gentle sea of people, united with others marching simultaneously in cities all around the world, from Romania to India to the US, to demand clean energy.

As we walked down Whitehall, somebody had made a pedal-power disco bus that played Donna Summer records, and everyone sang along to I Feel Love – and I did feel love, actually. My daughter shook her tambourine, and we marched alongside a woman with a banner saying, Chicks Dig Guys With Big Solar Panels, and then we passed a man dressed as a penguin. We met up with a friend who had brought her daughter, too, and our children proceeded to engage in a violent offensive against each other somewhere near the end of Downing Street.

Then we passed the Houses of Parliament, and I had a flashback to the day I got shown around them by an MP who took me for a sneaky fag at the foot of the clock tower, and how we had looked up at the endless tourists on the bridge taking their Big Ben photos, none of them thinking to glance down and get a shot of a politician sharing a Marlboro Light with a journalist.

The protest ended in a rally outside Parliament. People with loudhailers spoke. People without loudhailers cheered. The digging chick ended up deep in chat with the flightless bird, and gave him her phone number, and we all cheered again: it's always nice to see someone pick up a penguin.

My friend Jack, who likes to confound people's expectations of a male model, texted to ask me to take some photos of the demo and send them to him, so he could put them on his Instagram and make it look as if he was there, too.

The next day, the Rockefeller family, who made their vast fortune from oil, announced that they would get rid of their $50bn fossil fuel assets and reinvest the money only in clean energy. And I felt glad that I hadn't opted for a quiet life – even though that is, actually, the whole point of political activism. People don't go on marches to change the world, but to keep it steady. They go to tether the Earth to its axis and stop it spinning off its tilt altogether.

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