CAAT London

Monday 11^th December

After post-noon squash and another private lesson, I unlocked our mail box and opened a large brown envelope in the lift. It was the latest CAAT News magazine fronted with a photo from the DESO action that made me a cover star. I knew this day would come… Inside, in an unrelated column inch, it was mentioned that I’d raised £525 with my jump (actually £560) but sitting in front of BBC News 24, it was the fact that a London group was meeting for the first time tonight at a pub not far from home that got me on my bike. I rang up Chukuma, who was supposed to be coming round to borrow CDs, and cycled to the Albion, where Brighton Rob’s brother Andy had had his pre-club birthday drinks the only time I’d been there a year and a half ago or more.

There were 4 people at the table before I sat down, one of whom I’d recognised at the “shut it down” event. Now I know her name. The “co-ordinator” was a French guy off to Turkey having just done his Human Rights Masters. I feel slightly jealous. The other male and female were also younger than me but the next (and final) two people to turn up were semi-retired pensioners. The paragraph about the meeting had requested that we “come along and bring any ideas we had” but I was primarily going along. We went through ideas for a launch event and my idea of doing an “arms dealer crawl” was echoed immediately and got some support. I suggested we could hit 5 (I later scaled down to 3) companies involved in the arms trade in specific regions (I suggested Israel & Darfur, (Ian) suggested Indonesia/Aceh).

At home on the net after booking Canal 125 for the next meeting on Jan 15^th (my suggestion but I am not sure it’ll be a popular one with the ale drinkers), I sifted through addresses and links from the CAAT website. There are at least as many UK dealers/manufacturers inside the M25 as I had blindly suggested there might be and ideas for a tube-line style map are sloshing around my head. There’s even a company (Smiths) with a site in Watford that produces missile trigger systems for the Israeli army. These things are close to home and I, for one, didn’t know where until a few minutes of typing and clicking.