I wouldn’t want to miss May Day, but sometimes it seems like I’m taking the same pictures each year of the same people.
doing much the same things as last year. Sometimes I do it just a little better than other years, and I enjoy it but perhaps feel I’m not getting anywhere.
But the Turkish communists certainly put on a spirited performance, and one that makes a part of my heart warm, while elsewhere I’m chilled by the thought of Stalin.
Of course in my early years he was ‘Uncle Joe’ and still remembered here as the man who had led the dogged resistance that really defeated Hitler – with the help of arms and other supplies from the US and UK. We knew that without him we would have been living under German rule (or rather a later generation of German rule than the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.) But then few of us knew much about the purges and all the rest.
Of course there were some things new at May Day – including the launch of a new campaign for justice or at least better working conditions and more pay for one of the worst-treated groups of employees – domestic and restaurant workers.
Last year the event proved rather embarrassing for me, as getting down on my knees to photograph some of the many children who take part I heard a loud tearing sound as my trousers ripped from waist to knee. Fortunately that day I was wearing a jacket, and for the rest of the day covering the march and a later event in Parliament Square, I was kept more or less decent by this jacket tied around my waist as a skirt to cover the gaping hole. This year I made sure to bend down more carefully as I’d left my jacket at home!
Pictures and text from this year at London May Day March.
