It was a nice bright spring day, just perfect to go picketing the Scientology cult around New Street in front of their offices (2nd floor, above Thomas Cook). Just Dave, Jens, and John plus our sound system this time; apologies from three other regulars, no doubt they were present in spirit. We met from the train and started out around 13:00. No clams visible, though about 30 minutes later the DSA appeared and wanted to tie us up talking to waste our time. Apparently they had done so well that week, they didn't need to leaflet today. The true reason was apparent around 14:00, the Reg and her assistant had been leafleting the Palestine rally in the library square about 150 metres up the street from us. Their leaflets were explaining about the dangers of the drug Ecstasy (explaining, among other problems that it might have additives such as lactose) The relevance of this to the Middle East conflict was not obvious to lesser minds. They did not get much leafletting done, preferring to stand together in a huddle rather than trying to body-route. The DSA spent at least half an hour on a mobile phone, either trying to drum up reinforcements or reporting the awful sacrilege and his failure to confront it to his superiors. Since we were few in number, and the busker playing alto-sax wanted to inherit the pitch, we finished after 2 hours dead and went to a pub just round the corner on the other side. The DSA and his side-kick, two sneaky little gollums together, followed us to the pub and stood across the road for twenty minutes then went away. About 16:30 we headed for trains and home. Not our biggest demo ever but still, all in all, we had a grand day out. The sidekick had been tasked with photographing us, but had big problems operating a digital camera. We tried explaining to him that, when reading the instruction manual he had failed to apply L. Ron Hubbard's instructions which say that if one comes across a word one does not understand, you are to go to a dictionary and look up the word. For some reason this only seemed to make him more frustrated and less capable of using the camera, even without his DSA's unhelpful help. Perhaps if I hadn't been holding the microphone at the time I was pointing out how this was an example of how Scientology makes people less able they might have sorted themselves out.....
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