And so to the Stop The War march. We’d managed to assemble a handy crew of mates with kids this time – I think a few of us felt that this was better than us all marching separately because people without kids generally want to do different stuff on marches (like nip off to pubs!) and we could keep an eye on each other and all that. It took us about 4 hours to get from Gower Street to Cambridge Circus (normally a 20 minute walk) because of the sheer weight of people. Impressive, but frustrating – it was damn cold and we wanted to keep moving.

Still, there were some nice distractions on the way – someone on Gower Street took the trouble to play music out of their window for us (Paul Simon, admittedly, but still appreciated) plus a rather cute naked man danced around on his windowsill for us, with a banner reading “I love you!” The news was at pains to point out that loads of people were marching for the first time (which presumably is almost mathematically inevitable if it’s the biggest march in the history of the country or whatever), so there was lots of features on painfully middleclass people making banners in their Suffolk conservatories and suchlike. Which is great, of course. The crowd did seem to be the most diverse since the Poll Tax one.

But… you did wonder how far people’s opposition to war would go. My suspicion is that a good few marchers were in favour of war if the UN gave the go ahead, for example. Plus obviously you have yer raggle taggle of misfits who make up broad based coalitions. You know the deal – churches, political parties you wouldn’t normally piss on if they were on fire, that sort of thing. I’m usually quite cynical about the power of marches other than to galvanise people’s feelings and break down the isolation you feel having unpopular views. This is probably because most of the marches I have been on have been 100,000 people tops. You can’t help but feel that 1 or 2 million people makes all the difference and that this will have to have some kind of effect on policy.

And of course once people have marched once and felt good about it, and seen that most people there are not total nutters, they may be inclined to do so again.

So anyway, by the time we got to the Chinatown part of Shaftesbury Avenue, the kids were getting cold and tired (bless them, they did really well!) – so we bailed out. I think I had a vague intention of rejoining the march later, or getting to Hyde Park to see everyone together at the end, but we were all knackered so this didn’t happen.

We went to Burger King instead, heh heh. No doubt there will be some typical anarcho-moralists reading this who are shocked by that, but tough. You try finding somewhere in central london on a cold Saturday afternoon which has room for 3 buggies and food that their passengers will eat.

It was all going really well until I took the little one off to the toilets for a nappy change. I didn’t mind paying 20p to get in, and carrying her through a steel security turnstile, but I was a bit annoyed that after all that there was no changing room. The gents were somewhat inhospitable to say the least. No seats on the toilets in the cubicles (useful for balancing stuff on, or sitting on, or at least stopping the daughter putting her hand down the bowl) and the chrome and concrete fittings were all really depressing. So not one of the best, but at least it was clean. I exited the cubicle with old nappy suitably bagged up, and looked around for a bin.

No bins to be seen but there were a couple of staff in there cleaning up, one of whom was wearing a suit and tie, which I always take to mean a certain amount of helpfulness. Unfortunately for him, the guy gave me a load of blather when I asked where the bin was. He told me that I wasn’t “supposed to bring babies into the men’s toilets”. So obviously a strong commitment to customer service and gender equality there, then.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I questioned him somewhat, uh, “directly” about this. And basically the deal is that if you are a male parent in Burger King, you have to go and get a member of staff to change your baby in the women’s toilets. Now I’m sure Burger King employees have a wide portfolio of skills and backgrounds, and I’m even prepared to believe that some of them are trained by the company in child care, with special attention to nappy changing. But I’m still not convinced that handing over my offspring to a complete stranger to change her nappy is something I would be prepared to do. My conversation with the bloke continued in this vein for a while and we ended up agreeing that the best thing for me to do would be to throw the nappy sack on the floor.