Tuvalu

Climate Camp meeting at the Voldparken school, Copenhagen

I was always going to go to Copenhagen. 27 hours on a coach? Nah, didn’t phase me. And anyway I lucked out and got on the one with a loo and a dvd player… okay so the former was a sloshpit of doom and we had no dvds, but it was an auspicious start to my journey.

Climate Camp meets at Embankment to get on the coaches to Copenhagen

Now, what should you absolutely not do on a trip to the Cop 15 summit protests? Eat a McDonalds? Confess that actually, you’ll be flying home, because you’re a journalist who *absolutely* has to file a story before the weekend? Surreptitiously read Heat magazine in the ferry terminal sweetie shop? All of this happened on our trip to Copenhagen. You’ll be glad to hear (maybe) that I was only implicated in the latter offence, along with several other ladies who would prefer to remain anonymous.

Climate Campers pretending not to read Heat at Dover

The thing is, we climate activists have a very dull reputation to live up to – what with most people believing we’re just a smelly do-gooding bunch of un-fun loving “hedge monkeys“. But actually, we’re not. My friends from Climate Camp are for the most part an amusing gang to hang around with. And so am I. Hopefully. You see, we’re not here to push austerity, hardship, denial. That way failure lies – no one is going to change their ways if this is the story that we tell the world. It’s really important that actually, moving into a new way of life is more appealing. And the way we do that is by living it. How? Well, that’s a whole other blog. For now the point is that we laugh at ourselves quite a lot.

The Climate Camp coach. A bus load of fun, honest.

German sandwiches. Very good. The cheese ones that is.

So yes, back to the coach. Which is hardly a good way to back up this motive, surely? Maybe not. The coach ride was marginally uncomfortable, we got hardly any serious sleep (I snored – sorry Murray, my neighbour on the outward bound journey) and don’t even get me started on the trip back. BUT for me there were quite a few plusses. We got to see a German carpenter, a young man dressed in full traditional regalia, waiting to hitch a ride at a service station in the early hours of the morning.

A German carpenter boy trying to find a lift at a service station. This outfit is for real. At 5am

And we got to marvel at the miles and miles of beautiful wind farms on the border between Germany and Denmark. Even our coach drivers were impressed by the sight of them, elegantly swooping across the sky way above our heads. “Yeah, but I’m not giving up my car. And anyway, why didn’t you lot just fly? It’s way cheaper, quicker and easier.” Yes, erm. But, against the odds, it was actually a laugh and gave us time to form a sense of camaraderie with the people around us – most people didn’t know each other (I think I talked most of the way). Of course there was a certain sense of self-righteousness in travelling this way but it my point is it wasn’t as bad as you might think, especially when we took a short cut and managed to avoid the lengthy searches at the border that we had feared, which meant we steamed ahead of the other two Climate Camp coaches (who said our competitive spirit was dead?)

Why, I think I’ll have an ice-cream with my coffee. For breakfast. In December.

There was also, of course, a palpable sense of anticipation, for none of us had a clue where we were going to stay, or really what we would be doing, once we reached Copenhagen. But the kind of impromptu planning that would have my mother in an absolute tizz suits us activists, probably because we’re used to walking into situations that we have little control over, and of which we have no idea of the outcome. As we bowled along the motorway our sporadic contacts in Denmark informed us that we might be staying in a huge cold warehouse that was housing hundreds, had no heating and one toilet.  And which had just been the subject of a police raid. Then we heard word that there was in fact nowhere for us to stay. Still we remained calm. I’m sure that much of this confidence had to do with the fact of being with so many like-minded people, and the knowledge that we are good at acting as a community that looks after each other.

Voldparken school, Copenhagen. So sexy

Of course, our home was magically sorted out just as we arrived in Copenhagen and we were swiftly taken to the huge Voldparken elementary school that is the centre of a large suburban housing estate. (warning: I am about to go an architectural digression) Built in 1957, it has been moth-balled since 2008, which left me wondering where on earth the local children are now being educated. Needless to say I was immediately in love, modernist architecture being my absolute favourite. Now, unlike us the Danes build for cold weather so that every exit to the exterior is buffered by a well-insulated antechamber. Through the first chamber you come straight into a distinctive central hallway bounded by lilac pillars and bold staircases surrounded by galleries – this would be where we would hold our daily meetings. Behind the main building is a large play area and other buildings, including a big sports hall and large communal showers (with lovely hot pressured water, much better than any shower I ever have in London) I could talk at length about how beautiful the Voldparken is to a geek like me, but I’ll stop here, since this is a blog about climate and activism and exciting things like that. You can see a tour of the accommodation on my qik video stream here.

The main hallway at Voldparken school, Copenhagen

Sharing 18 to a room we laid our sleeping bags out within the carefully masked out fire lines and marvelled at the generosity of the massively overstretched Danish activists who had worked so hard to sort this out with the City Council. There was one downside, however, which was that fire regulations meant we weren’t allowed to cook in the school. Of course, we easily got around this by boiling lots of kettles and skipping food that could be eaten without heating up (Denmark is something else for skipping – the quality was out of this world, sooooo much yummy pastries and bread)

The play area behind the main building at Voldparken after a sprinkling of snow. You can see people heading for the portaloos!

The room where I slept, laid out like a sausage, with 17 other people. It wasn’t exactly luxury, but I liked it, being a social bean (and used to slumming it) Plus I had two lovely thick thermarests to soften the floor.

Eating skipped food at the Voldparken school after a long cold day on the streets. Yum!

It wasn’t long before we had boarded a bus into town, which delivered us straight into the belly of the beast, the Hopenhagen display, sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola and Siemens, glowing like an alien installation beneath a huge McDonalds advert. Greenwash anyone? Open mouthed we walked past brilliant green boxes of nothing very much except hot air, and stood gawping under the giant balloon. (Why?) From there we went in search of food, coming across the bizarre spectacle of a “Klima Camp” in the central shopping district – a small group of friendly scouts heating marshmallows over braziers. Quite a contrast to the jamboree down the road.

Hopenhagen Greenwash in the centre of Copenhagen

Ooh, is it an alien spaceship? No, it’s HOPENHAGEN, here to save the world with corporate sponsorship

Hopenhagen adverts EVERYWHERE. some say it looks very similar to the Climate Camp poster for 2009…

Klima Camp – Danish scouts camped out on the flagstones in central Copenhagen!

Via the freezing docks we had soon found our way down to Freetown Christiania, which is a well known autonomous community that is a haven for alternative thinking and thereby a fitting place for the Climate Bottom alternative Climate Summit, held inside a big top tent. Inside we found warmth, hot vegan slop and familiar faces – for many Climate Campers were already in Copenhagen, and spread out around crash spaces throughout the city.

Graffiti on the walls in Christiania. Next to this was an incongruous and very chic restaurant – gentrification has started.

still find it very hard to reconcile this peaceful space with the knowledge that only a few days later the Danish police carried out a completely disproportionate tear gas attack on a bunch of activists who were enjoying a drink and a boogie after a speech by Naomi Klein. Designed to demoralise and fracture our networks, it certainly left a lot of people with their first experience of the sheer panic that tear gas can cause in a confined “safe” space. Luckily I had left a few hours earlier, but as news of the attack twittered its way to me I lay awake through the night worrying about my fellow roomies, many of whom had been detained and some of whom did not return until the morning.

Climate Camp meeting at the Voldparken school, Copenhagen

I was always going to go to Copenhagen. 27 hours on a coach? Nah, didn’t phase me. And anyway I lucked out and got on the one with a loo and a dvd player… okay so the former was a sloshpit of doom and we had no dvds, but it was an auspicious start to my journey.

Climate Camp meets at Embankment to get on the coaches to Copenhagen

Now, what should you absolutely not do on a trip to the Cop 15 summit protests? Eat a McDonalds? Confess that actually, you’ll be flying home, because you’re a journalist who *absolutely* has to file a story before the weekend? Surreptitiously read Heat magazine in the ferry terminal sweetie shop? All of this happened on our trip to Copenhagen. You’ll be glad to hear (maybe) that I was only implicated in the latter offence, along with several other ladies who would prefer to remain anonymous.

Climate Campers pretending not to read Heat at Dover

The thing is, we climate activists have a very dull reputation to live up to – what with most people believing we’re just a smelly do-gooding bunch of un-fun loving “hedge monkeys“. But actually, we’re not. My friends from Climate Camp are for the most part an amusing gang to hang around with. And so am I. Hopefully. You see, we’re not here to push austerity, hardship, denial. That way failure lies – no one is going to change their ways if this is the story that we tell the world. It’s really important that actually, moving into a new way of life is more appealing. And the way we do that is by living it. How? Well, that’s a whole other blog. For now the point is that we laugh at ourselves quite a lot.

The Climate Camp coach. A bus load of fun, honest.

German sandwiches. Very good. The cheese ones that is.

So yes, back to the coach. Which is hardly a good way to back up this motive, surely? Maybe not. The coach ride was marginally uncomfortable, we got hardly any serious sleep (I snored – sorry Murray, my neighbour on the outward bound journey) and don’t even get me started on the trip back. BUT for me there were quite a few plusses. We got to see a German carpenter, a young man dressed in full traditional regalia, waiting to hitch a ride at a service station in the early hours of the morning.

A German carpenter boy trying to find a lift at a service station. This outfit is for real. At 5am

And we got to marvel at the miles and miles of beautiful wind farms on the border between Germany and Denmark. Even our coach drivers were impressed by the sight of them, elegantly swooping across the sky way above our heads. “Yeah, but I’m not giving up my car. And anyway, why didn’t you lot just fly? It’s way cheaper, quicker and easier.” Yes, erm. But, against the odds, it was actually a laugh and gave us time to form a sense of camaraderie with the people around us – most people didn’t know each other (I think I talked most of the way). Of course there was a certain sense of self-righteousness in travelling this way but it my point is it wasn’t as bad as you might think, especially when we took a short cut and managed to avoid the lengthy searches at the border that we had feared, which meant we steamed ahead of the other two Climate Camp coaches (who said our competitive spirit was dead?)

Why, I think I’ll have an ice-cream with my coffee. For breakfast. In December.

There was also, of course, a palpable sense of anticipation, for none of us had a clue where we were going to stay, or really what we would be doing, once we reached Copenhagen. But the kind of impromptu planning that would have my mother in an absolute tizz suits us activists, probably because we’re used to walking into situations that we have little control over, and of which we have no idea of the outcome. As we bowled along the motorway our sporadic contacts in Denmark informed us that we might be staying in a huge cold warehouse that was housing hundreds, had no heating and one toilet.  And which had just been the subject of a police raid. Then we heard word that there was in fact nowhere for us to stay. Still we remained calm. I’m sure that much of this confidence had to do with the fact of being with so many like-minded people, and the knowledge that we are good at acting as a community that looks after each other.

Voldparken school, Copenhagen. So sexy

Of course, our home was magically sorted out just as we arrived in Copenhagen and we were swiftly taken to the huge Voldparken elementary school that is the centre of a large suburban housing estate. (warning: I am about to go an architectural digression) Built in 1957, it has been moth-balled since 2008, which left me wondering where on earth the local children are now being educated. Needless to say I was immediately in love, modernist architecture being my absolute favourite. Now, unlike us the Danes build for cold weather so that every exit to the exterior is buffered by a well-insulated antechamber. Through the first chamber you come straight into a distinctive central hallway bounded by lilac pillars and bold staircases surrounded by galleries – this would be where we would hold our daily meetings. Behind the main building is a large play area and other buildings, including a big sports hall and large communal showers (with lovely hot pressured water, much better than any shower I ever have in London) I could talk at length about how beautiful the Voldparken is to a geek like me, but I’ll stop here, since this is a blog about climate and activism and exciting things like that. You can see a tour of the accommodation on my qik video stream here.

The main hallway at Voldparken school, Copenhagen

Sharing 18 to a room we laid our sleeping bags out within the carefully masked out fire lines and marvelled at the generosity of the massively overstretched Danish activists who had worked so hard to sort this out with the City Council. There was one downside, however, which was that fire regulations meant we weren’t allowed to cook in the school. Of course, we easily got around this by boiling lots of kettles and skipping food that could be eaten without heating up (Denmark is something else for skipping – the quality was out of this world, sooooo much yummy pastries and bread)

The play area behind the main building at Voldparken after a sprinkling of snow. You can see people heading for the portaloos!

The room where I slept, laid out like a sausage, with 17 other people. It wasn’t exactly luxury, but I liked it, being a social bean (and used to slumming it) Plus I had two lovely thick thermarests to soften the floor.

Eating skipped food at the Voldparken school after a long cold day on the streets. Yum!

It wasn’t long before we had boarded a bus into town, which delivered us straight into the belly of the beast, the Hopenhagen display, sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola and Siemens, glowing like an alien installation beneath a huge McDonalds advert. Greenwash anyone? Open mouthed we walked past brilliant green boxes of nothing very much except hot air, and stood gawping under the giant balloon. (Why?) From there we went in search of food, coming across the bizarre spectacle of a “Klima Camp” in the central shopping district – a small group of friendly scouts heating marshmallows over braziers. Quite a contrast to the jamboree down the road.

Hopenhagen Greenwash in the centre of Copenhagen

Ooh, is it an alien spaceship? No, it’s HOPENHAGEN, here to save the world with corporate sponsorship

Hopenhagen adverts EVERYWHERE. some say it looks very similar to the Climate Camp poster for 2009…

Klima Camp – Danish scouts camped out on the flagstones in central Copenhagen!

Via the freezing docks we had soon found our way down to Freetown Christiania, which is a well known autonomous community that is a haven for alternative thinking and thereby a fitting place for the Climate Bottom alternative Climate Summit, held inside a big top tent. Inside we found warmth, hot vegan slop and familiar faces – for many Climate Campers were already in Copenhagen, and spread out around crash spaces throughout the city.

Graffiti on the walls in Christiania. Next to this was an incongruous and very chic restaurant – gentrification has started.

still find it very hard to reconcile this peaceful space with the knowledge that only a few days later the Danish police carried out a completely disproportionate tear gas attack on a bunch of activists who were enjoying a drink and a boogie after a speech by Naomi Klein. Designed to demoralise and fracture our networks, it certainly left a lot of people with their first experience of the sheer panic that tear gas can cause in a confined “safe” space. Luckily I had left a few hours earlier, but as news of the attack twittered its way to me I lay awake through the night worrying about my fellow roomies, many of whom had been detained and some of whom did not return until the morning.

Images throughout courtesy of Little Glass Clementine.

The jewellery designer Little Glass Clementine is enough to melt the heart of any eco-conscious fashionista, more about the innocence in its name alone summarising the beauty of the designs– jewellery with soul. The ethos for these designs is simple; naturally sourced materials used to maximum effect to create intricate necklaces and exquisite hair pieces. The brainchild behind this brand that can regress even the most mature person to ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ in child-like wonder, hospital is Clementine James, cheap or Clemmie. Many Amelia’s readers will recognise Clementine from the earth section of our magazine as she was interviewed last year about her time spent in the remote location of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. A self taught jeweller Clementine has been skilfully making and selling her creations since the tender age of 16. Her aim is to tell a story with recycled materials stumbled upon to create something new by transforming the old so memories can live on.

Clemmie describes her sourced materials through a set of findings: “A ring from a love affair, a pebble from a Scottish shore, a button from a grandmother’s box, gems from India, a single earring, jewels from a charity shop, junk from a boot fair, lace from an antique market, fabric from an old coat, and pearls from the sea.” These individual items work together to create the ultimate in reclaimed possessions, and comprise the perfect accessories to make even the most ordinary outfit look both unique and interesting.

Clementine has exhibited in galleries and boutiques in both London and Edinburgh and has sold in a plethora of shops, markets and even Brighton beach! For me the best thing about the designs in the brands back catalogue is the inspiration they can ignite for others. Whether it’s the urge to buy a Little Glass Clementine necklace, to revisit old memories or to get crafty with the pliers, there’s something about Clementine James that can make anyone feel inclined to be creative and eco-friendly.

Written by Ella Okore on Thursday January 14th, 2010 3:15 pm

Categories ,brighton, ,Clementine James, ,Ella Okore, ,Little Glass Clementine, ,Tuvalu

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