It's one thing talking about photograpers' needs and interests and the importance of free access to news, as a keyboard-bound union activist. It's quite another, putting yourself in the thick of it. Events until then had provided many, many happy, colourful pictures. People dancing in the spray from an impromptu four- storey fountain, that sort of thing.
Confrontation does sell.
So, I perk up my antennae to detect the least sign of tension - I need to be where it kicks off before it happens. That's the furry TV microphone on its boom, and those may be people who might join in if it finds a ruck. And so we shape the news even before it happens. When it does kick off, I find myself with a TV crew. They can barely believe that the union is out here, where it counts for them.