....but at about 6 o clock about a million peopple were trying to get on the tube at bethnal green

and apparently the organisation was terrible. They said there was no programme so you didn't know when bands were playing.

nerd posting on the internet an hour later
yes, you had no idea at all when the bands were playing, but there were programmes which helfully listed the bands in the wrong order and on the wrong stages.
I'd say it was marginally better than watching tv for most of it, and the last hour was good.

but lots of people walked past my house on the way back from it so i'm sure someone went.

It was, y'know, alright. There was a huge amount of very preachy anti-BNP sloganeering, loads of crap bands and nothing much to do other than watch sloganeering and crap bands. And I missed Patrick Wolf, gah.

so bored today

just left as the sun came out whch bummed me out a little, but it was relativly easy to get home.

It was also a really good opportunity to find out more about the GLA elections cos I didn't know how or who to vote for, but a nice guy at the green party stand explained it to me.

Like someone else said - terribly organised. Firstly not being able to bring alcohol in even though the website only mentioned glass meant we had to spend an hour drinking what we'd bought for the day outside.

Then the lack of times meant we just wandered about the stages looking for something decent and never finding it. Pretty hopeless really. Spoke to one of the people who helped organise it and they said they don't print times because the bands do it for free and therefore can't be guaranteed to turn up at the right time but Rise festival is the exact same thing and they manage it.

Shame to have a pretty decent lineup and loads of people not be able to find the stuff they wanna see really.

but all the anti-BNP messages were ruined by moronic chants of 'fuck the BNP' started by the speakers onstage. By resorting to swearing, it seemed to drag the whole message down to a hooligan level, and there were young kids around too which made it more out of order. Get Cape went for a more practical approach, encouraging everyone to vote for someone that wasn't BNP. If they'd all done that onstage, maybe the event would have done more good than just making people feel proud of themselves for going.

I was pretty underwhelmed by the music apart from the thirty seconds I caught of Patrick Wolf.

"Isn't having someone shout slogans for you to just shout back at them from a stage how pretty much everything bad in history started."

Although the message was hard to argue with, it did feel a bit like a preach-to-the-converted-a-thon x 10 to the power of 5.

And I'm not sure that man with no teeth suckling white ace at 9am and selling soggy mdma wrapped up in kitchen roll actually fought any racisms throughout the whole day.

I fought 4, but had to go and do my washing.

I was so bored... and underwhelmed by the music and crowd, to be frank, as well as the BNP rants.
Ended up spending the latter half of the day around the pubs of Victoria Park with friends which was MUCH MORE FUN.

So I bailed at that point.

That might not bode well for Field Day.

So I stayed in. Twas only up the road, so I saw all the people heading up to it. They seemed to be 75% kids there for The View, 20% larger louts 5% families and 100% white.

I watched Ghostbusters on UKTV Gold instead. WIN