If it's Saturday,it must be Kilburn Square

It's Saturday.My brain stumbles out of sleep and tries to grasp what i ought to do today.Decisions,decisions.I half struggle to half remember.

An invitation to hear Jerry Hicks speak,the"rank and file"candidate for the UNITE the Union General Secretaryship in the current election.But then the venue has been changed,and i don't know the new venue-so that is out.I wonder though is there is some kind of sabotage or conspiracy here?A late invitation to a much  missed friends birthday party,but i don't know her new address,so that unfortunately is out too.

So its down to one of two then.My TUSC/trades unionist and socialist coalition friends have invited me to a showing of Ken Loach's new documentary,"The Spirit of '45",in Dalston.I know this is important,and I'd like to see the friends who invited me......i can't quite decide.

Then i get a call,and on the spur of the moment i decide to go to Kilburn Square for 1pm.It enables me to pass on the banner of the CSFHC/counihan-sanchez family housing campaign,which we can alo use to mark our patch/pitch by laying it on the pavement,and carry out the commitment i feel to this campaign.

I set off,feeling slightly feeble as i often do these days,as age and health problems take their toll these days but knowing that when i'm active and doing things with friends and comrades those feelings fade if not completely,then into the background.I also know,but am not daunted by the reality that this activity will take me fairly directly not just into"pain with the world",but into the more specific and individual difficulties of some if not all the people we talk to in our leafletting.

That is exactly what happens.I talk to a young man probably in his 20s,who thinks his parents may be victims of the"bedroom tax"and i like to think our conversation and the offer of a draft enquiry/appeal letter might encourage him to check with the parents he is currently resident with.An older man tells me that two of his older woman neighbours are"in the thick"of these anxieties,but he leaves me encouraged and armed with letters for his friends.A black woman comes across the street,sent by a fellow activist who has alerted her to the reality that she too is at the blunt of this essentially silly tax but which has such serious consequences for its victims.She too leaves armed with letters and leaflets,and my comrade is optimistic that we might have another"well placed"recruit to our campaign.I too,hope so.We need more people to do more of the tasks facing us,and as we do more,it is likely that further,greater need will emerge,in turn requiring more people to help each other.

We are joined by more campaigners/supporters,although inevitably some in turn are drawn away by other demands on their time.After a busy time,those of us left"wrap it up"and head to our favourite local cafe,who support our campaign anyway to talk before we too go our separate ways....And in that conversation we find that one of us,is also being victimised by this tax and that he has already had a deduction from benefits,without any notification of this.It distresses me again that someone already in other difficulties is also faced by a procedure which might also be called"institutional abuse"in that it seems to an an innappropriate and abusive application of procedures which are improperly applied.Yet its all functional.....

In the back of my head,is another thought.My primary commitment is to this campaign.I believe in it.And i share with my comrade/friend that,at worst it wil be better to fight,resist and lose,than not to resist at all.My other thought though,is that this echoes and mirrors some aspects of my experience as an adolescent.For by the time i was 15,i was beginning to find things to become active in,and having done so,"we"would all gather in the town square of my hometown on saturday afternoon,to be in each others company,to jst be,to organise,to exchange news.At its height,at its busiest that would include various members and associates of 3 or 4 youth organisations/arts labs,none of them in any way"official"and several political groupings of what might then as now be called the left,and others....none of us ever had the money for tea or coffee,but otherwise it was the same.And i realise what links the two experiences over 40 years apart is the sense of friendship and comradeship,that i realise is pretty central to my life.

Those were the days before the internet and mobile phones.Those new technologies mean that before i even get home,i can "check in"with my other friends about what i have missed,and about the choice i did not make.It also means that i can write about the experience and share it with an immediacy too.

In passing,there is something else in common-that like the adolescent that i was then,i could not bear to miss anything.And thats the case now,i might be 59 now but like when i was 17 i still can't bear to miss anything.I guess that these technologies enable me at least to catch the"echoes"of a second experience or event even if i can't immerse myself in it.And i can always try to pester those friends later too.....

d1/200413