There were quite a few of us on a little diplomatic walking tour through central London today. 20,000 at a minimum I reckon, but that’s just a number I’ve pulled out of the air. I never saw the beginning or the end of the march, even when we doubled back on ourselves, wrapped around three sides of the park in front of the US Embassy. Doubtless The Sun will report that 10 crazy hippies were the entirety of it; The Socialist Worker will reckon there was a couple of million.

We gathered at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, walked past the heavily barricaded US Embassy to Downing Street, passing all the big sights along the way: Marble Arch, Pall Mall, The Ritz. You could tell how important a place was by the number of police in fluorescent yellow jackets standing guard outside. Outside the US Embassy there were a fair few, standing amongst various barricades and fences that separated the Anti-War March from the building, some with video cameras, others with police dogs – the kind trained to rip your legs off, rather than the cute beagles we have sniffing out illicit fruit and veg at Auckland Airport.

Paddy wagons lined the side roads near Downing Street. I had to cut out early so didn’t see if they were put to use. The most trouble I saw was when we assembled outside Downing Street to deliver pairs of children’s shoes, to represent the slaughtered children in Lebanon and Israel. Either there were some kids with very strong arms who’d done the march in clown-sized shoes … or a few of the adults took the opportunity to vent a bit of frustration.

A Hizbullah contingent was present. A small group of Lebanese (I assume) guys and girls – probably around my age, 22 – waved yellow Hizbullah flags and chanted “We Are All Hizbullah”.

“No,” one woman near me said strongly. “We are not all Hizbullah. We are Lebanese”. I think that encompassed the mood of most of the crowd, but I still found the loud Hizbullah supporters disturbing.

The crowd was huge, and it was varied. People of all ages and nationalities marched, chanted Ceasefire Now, and waved their flags. Bus loads of people had been brought in from surrounding areas: “rent-a-mob” as one man from the Midlands described himself wryly. This wasn’t like those slow processions I took part in in Auckland either, where we’d try to make the couple of kilometres’ walk up Queen Street last an hour. There was considerable ground to be covered today, and there was no dawdling.

It felt good to be doing something political again; I’ve missed that since I left Auckland. It wasn’t much, but it was good to do something with the aim of helping others. Hell, I stood outside Downing Street and the US Embassy and shouted for an end to violence in Lebanon and Israel. There are worse ways of spending a Saturday arvo.

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