Direct action must be full of moments when you think “what on earth am I doing?” I had one of those last weekend. I went along to follow the Climate Camp protesters who were targetting Ratcliffe on Soar power station, and, after an afternoon full of incident, during which both a protester and a police officer collapsed and had to be stretchered away from the scene, there was a meeting in the woods about what to do next.

It was decided that protesters would try one more time to get into the plant; half the group would go one way and create a diversion, while the other half would sneak round to the north west point where the fences were weakest and try to get in. I followed my journalistic instinct (also my natural instinct unfortunately) to go where there was most likely to be trouble, and followed the second group.

And there began the most ridiculous, hilarious wander through the woods of my life. The idea was to sneak round under cover, and a couple of the activists had clearly already spent plenty of time getting to know the area. They led us up across a field (past two policemen on motorbikes, so the cover was blown straight away), into a small copse, and then along a line of woodland up above the northern line of the power station perimetre. Half along another policeman on a motorbike peered into the woodland and we all lay down on our stomachs and then carried on - crawling under brambles, climbing over strands of barbed wire.

After about what felt like half an hour, when darkness was falling, I had lost all sense of direction and was just longing and longing to be at home with my children, watching the X Factor. At this point someone sent a whisper back that we were nearly there. At that point my phone vibrated in my pocket: it was an editor wanting to know what was going on. I sat down in the mud, as the bottoms of activists disappeared like rabbits into a tiny hole in the undergrowth in front of me, and tried to describe the scene. “Stay safe!” he said, audibly sipping from a cup of tea down the other end of the phone. I have never wanted a cup of tea so much in my life.

When I got through the hole myself, it was to find a police spotlight trained upon us all. At this point an overwhelming sense of “that’s enough” swept over me. I no longer cared about arrests. I no longer cared about watching people getting into the plant. All I could think about was getting into my car, finding a service station and having some dinner. By now it really was dark, and I was starving, so I set off along the path (why hadn’t we just taken the path?) that runs around the perimetre back to the perimetre. A black-hooded anarchist fell in beside me, and as we sauntered through the woods and past the police still stationed beneath spotlights by the fence, we had an amiable conversation about the roots of the Zapatista struggle. One police van honked, and I wondered if we should wave, and then decided it was politer to just pretend they weren’t there.

Direct Action, man. If your life is sadly lacking the surreal, this is definitely the place to be.

Words: Bibi van der Zee
Photo: Flickr user Lady Wulfrun