Stratford Stop Esso

Transposed from an older blog

Moved into new house last night, out picketing Esso station today. Folk from Essex and Islington had pulled the evnt together, but I had been thinking for some time about starting up a local group for East London.

There had been an East London network, up until summer 2003 but the Area Networker Robin, got a job at Greenpeace on the climate team, and the network slowly shrunk without him.

So I was thinking Stratford would be the perfect place to meet, and then we could campaign accross East London. The idea would be to do something as ourselves each month, and something in conjunction with one of the three neighbouring groups each month. i.e. Islington, Greenwich & Havering.

So an Esso picket in Stratford seemed the perfect place to launch a new group. Especially as 2 other people from East London were going to be there.

So 3 hours of picketing later we headed to the pub to sort out details. arrgghhh I'd say the devil was always in the details, but it turns out the details are the work of the devil. It took another 2 hours to sort out a meeting date, mainly because folk from Essex didn't want the date to clash with any of there, very variable meetings or with Islington meetings.

Finally got sorted by getting Havering to meet on a regular date, i.e the first Wednesday of the month. Then we get to meet on the second Wednesday and everyone gets to be happy for now.

For Shaun's write up of the day see here