On a cold but clear March day, four suppressives (later joined by one more) including one new picketer, turned up outside the Tottenham Court Road "org" to mark L. Ron Hubbard"s birthday. What a dismal sight! No posters on the windows, just a boring row of books and two "Free Stress Test" signs. Not even the supposedly mandatory "Now Hiring/Help Wanted" sign. It looked dead and was dead. Not so much an org as a morgue.

We leafleted, and I did my stint at the boom-box, until it developed power problems, so I just had to rely on good old-fashioned lung-power. Most of the time we outnumbered the Scientologists. One chap tried the "Death Stare" from inside the "org", was laughed at, and never showed his face again. Another was more persistent, and tried to show his skills at non-blinking. He was more persistent, but also got mocked for wasting his money on taking a course developing such a useless skill. He also tried complaining about the cold and yawning hoping that we would be driven to give up. As with so many Scientology techniques, it might seem to work in the Scientology course-room, but is useless in the real world. He insisted that he could make his own decisions, so we gave him two leaflets (two because Scientology would obviously take the first leaflet away on some plausible pretext) whereupon his Scientology superior ran out to snatch them away from him, just pulling back in time as the gales of laughter revealed that she was behaving in exactly the way we had predicted.

The Scientologists eventually brought out a pile of leaflets and put them on a shelf, but never got round to actually trying to give them out. The only criticism we met was from a couple of people who mistook us for Scientologists, and many people thanked us for our efforts. After two hours we retreated to a nice warm pub to discuss our successful day. Returning from the pub at 6:15 the "org" was completely shuttered up. This is an org on its last legs. We will be back soon to kick them away.