I DIDN’T wake up on Saturday planning to, but three hours later I found myself slipping through the mud, jumping over puddles in the sheeting rain at Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park waiting, along with several thousand people for the climate march to begin. I had planned on vacuuming, tidying and a bit of cushion-plumping. You know, the usual middle-aged, Covid Saturday fare. The kids were away and I had the house to myself but some days you surprise yourself – those are the best days.

Although a veteran of anti-apartheid marches in the 1980s and more recently for a variety of humanitarian causes, climate change is a cause I’ve never felt I'm worthy of really getting behind.

Having a diesel car, enjoying meat at least a couple of times a week, relishing a yearly foreign holiday by plane, and being no stranger to the temperature gauge on my heating, I felt guilty that I was part of the problem.

I knew, at a very basic level, that I cared about the environment and what state I would leave it for the kids and their kids but my lack of action, my lack of personal sacrifice, meant I ruled myself out of protesting.

Call it an epiphany or an extreme case of FOMO (fear of missing out) but on Saturday morning as I lay in bed, I wanted to be with people who cared too.

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That’s how I found myself head to toe in waterproofs standing in the mud listening to an eloquent man from West Papua pleading for his country to be saved from on top of a fire engine in the park.

As the PA system faltered and the students around me chattered about their extreme drinking exploits, I felt the sudden urge to whoop loudly to let him know we were paying attention to his plight.

It came out more of a whimper though. The guilt of the interloper was strong. For two hours we waited to feed into the longest line of humanity I had ever seen.

Just as I could feel my waterproofs begin to fail catastrophically, we began to move.

In a moment that got my hackles up, a man in a high-vis jacket bellowed: “The black block can’t join our block. Just wait your turn!” I turned, very concerned at what I’d find, to see a group of about 25 black hoodie, black jeans-wearing boys, their bluey-white faces chittering in the cold, passively accepting the man’s orders.

I’d never seen that in my day – march segregation is real, people. And so, it seemed, this became a bit of a theme.

As we approached the point where we were to feed into the main march, we stopped abruptly. I went to see what was going on. Extinction Rebellion were passing – thousands and thousands of them led by the most joyous samba drums played by a group of smiling women bedecked in tinsel and woolly hats.

The samba drew me to them but an older man crinkled his nose up somewhat snootily, I thought, and said: “Wait ‘til they go through. We’re not with them.”

I followed the sounds of the samba anyway. After them came a large group of what I presume were socialist activists with their bright crimson flags standing out against the grey Glasgow skies, surrounded by police in their fluorescent green jackets. Four red flares were held aloft, as they passed to the sounds of “When the saints go marching.”

I followed on, finding myself in a friendly group of people demanding fair rents. I was grateful that my mask hid my mouth as I thought it would be somewhat disingenuous for a 50-something woman who hasn’t paid rent in 30 years to be chanting “Fair rents now! and something about “Keep your dropdown mortgage!”

Feeling I might soon somehow be outed as a disgusting homeowner, I wandered against the tide, waiting for a group I wouldn’t feel like a total fraud marching with. The vegans looked like a lovely bunch but I felt sure they’d know somehow that I was a meat-eater; the ‘destroy the system’ folk a bit too rad for me; and the group with tree trunks on their backs – well that just seemed like too much hard work.

I eventually ended up with a group of older people in their 60s and 70s who wanted foreign debt cancelled. We marched alongside a man in a wetsuit pedalling a rickshaw with seaweed attached blaring out entrancing electronic music. Us oldies danced our way up the street some of us pulling out our robotic moves, last seen in the 1980s.

The sky brightened, people in overlooking flats banged pots and I noticed some of the crazy anomalies of the climate crisis debate: The distributing of thousands of paper leaflets, the bins over-flowing with abandoned banners, flags and placards and the hundreds of police vans sent to patrol the march.

A couple in their mid-70s with a Climate Justice Now banner told me they had never been on a march before but they were doing this for their first great grand-daughter’s future. They’d flown up from London.

This same group became outraged when they saw the group from earlier with the red flags had either stopped or been stopped and pushed up a side street, surrounded by police.

“Let them go! Let them go!” they chanted, refusing to continue on their way. It was a magical moment of solidarity between the generations.

I was glad I went. Guilt at being one of those anomalies associated with the climate crisis almost stopped me.

Just because we are conflicted, just because it is complicated, doesn’t mean we can’t all do our bit, regardless of all our other agendas. Climate change is the one issue that affects all.

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