Faced with the prospect of another Monday meeting London Reclaim the Streets decided 'sod this, let's go to the ballet'.

Last night (30/7) a performance of Swan Lake was being relayed from the Royal Opera House into the Covent Garden piazza. The RTS love of the higher arts is legendary, but what caught our eye most was the sponsorship, a lovely BP logo plastered everywhere.

We weren't up for pissing off hundreds of people by spoiling their entertainment (they weren't the £100 a seat crowd), so we went for a low key presence, holding up the wonderful 'bye-bye planet' banner we used at the Natural History Museum (we visited their BP sponsored Ecology exhibition earlier this year), and gave out loads of the glossy BP flyers we had for the same event.

The flyers expose the lies behind BP's 'green' rebranding. They plan to extract more not less oil over the next 5 years, bankrolled Bush (stick that in your Esso boycott), and are complicit in human rights abuses in Colombia.

People were pretty receptive, and the sight of one of us dressed as a half ballet dancer half paramilitary, complete with tutu didn't seem to put them off.

Our biggest fan was a uniformed copper, who played the 'we've been keeping our eyes on you, we saw you at such and such a pub last saturday' game with one of our number. He even accompanied us down the road after we left, fearful we should get lost in the mean streets of covent garden. His number was CX 579, fairly big and broad, with a pleasing scottish lilt to his voice. Interesting to note that they know BP are disliked enough to have a member of the stasi standing by at an event they sponsor....