The march.

So, the strike and that. I’ve never done a strike before, I’m not a natural trades unionist to be honest. I had assumed that members of my family would have taken part in industrial action in the ‘30s as they were either ship builders or miners at the time, but apparently when the strikes happened my predecessors just quit and joined the army. Fair enough. So there you go, I was the first of the Chipz line to come out on strike. And what an interesting day it was too.

I met a colleague at the tube and walked to the rallying point. We tried to find our LEA so we could march with them, but the whole thing had clearly not been organised by a primary school teacher as the boroughs were not lined up alphabetically. Disgusting. What’s the world fucking coming to? I didn’t care though, Billy Bragg was doing the warm-up so I was turgid with glee. Despite being no leftie I do like Billy Bragg. Eventually found my comrades by their underwhelming banner. My LEA is not really a hotbed of left-wing militancy so the banner was just plain shite. However, you should have seen the ones from places like Lambeth. Fuck me, proper left-wing headbangers that lot. I liked the Pimlico one, they’d obviously had this very impressive banner for ages and were loathe to change it, even though one of the demands on it was to “Free Nelson Mandela”. Or maybe if you marched with them you got a free Nelson Mandela, I’ll never know now. My friend and I were joined by a lovely bloke who’s just retired from teaching, he used to teach occasionally at my school while his career wound down. He’d turned up to support us young ‘uns. Good on him. None of the other fuckers from my school bothered to turn up, although at least they came out on strike, which is more than can be said for a shower of bastards down the road from us who didn’t. Whistles blew, some random bloke started egging us on with a mic about how the teachers fought the fascists from the National Front in the 80s (great, but this is about pay, let’s not start banging on about other shit eh?) and off we went. I’ve never been on a march before and it took a while to get used to the idea that the bearded waster next to me blowing a fucking annoying whistle was on my side. Every fibre of my being fought the urge to thrash him for the pinko layabout he probably might have been.

As we headed down the Strand that utter pillock George Galloway threw his corpulent body onto the bandwagon and went thundering past in his open top battle bus honking like a scotch goose and demanding ‘Respect’ for teachers. Very clever, see what you’ve done there George. Now fuck off and pretend to be a cat. Before someone else knocks you out with a fucking stress ball. Cunt.

We approached the houses of parliament and were diverted around the green. It was quite bizarre, some insane woman wearing a top hat and a ‘Bollocks to Blair’ t-shirt was haranguing us, took me a while to realise that she (I think) was on ‘our’ side. The t-shirt had gold lettering on it, like the Pimlico School she probably figured there was still some mileage in it. She shouted at us through a very distorted megaphone that we were going the wrong way (yes dear, that’s because the nice policemen want us to, and being teachers we do what the police ask us), we should in fact be marching on the very houses of parliament. No, you see we can’t, there’s that law in place and what would we do anyway? Storm it? 10,000 teachers flapping about the palaces of the mighty in sandals would just be embarrassing. Then she urged us to march on Buckingham Palace. What? Why? The Queen doesn’t sign our pay checks you silly bitch! And hang on…you’re American! What on earth was this insane American woman haranguing English teachers for? Thanks for lesson in British politics dear but you know, fuck off. I suspect she’s ‘rent a mob’, I’d wager she’s there for any march wearing her top hat and ‘Bollocks to Blair’ t-shirt.

We arrived at the destination for the rally and the hordes of upset educators filed indoors. Man, it was going to be crowded in there. The only option was to go the pub and have lunch, so we did.

Vive la revolution!